Jane Mayer: Another Timing Gap in the Levin Torture Report

Last night, I noted that harsh interrogation tactics were used on Abu Zubaydah months before the Bybee memo authorized them.

Mark Benjamin, at Salon, points out that Levin’s report also belies the notion that the Bush Administration turned to coercion as a last resort. In September 2006, for instance, President Bush claimed that the government used “harsh” techniques only after Abu Zubaydah “stopped talking.” However, it is now clear from the chronology supplied by the Levin report that the C.I.A. and the military were preparing a blueprint for brutality months before they even had captured a single high-level Al Qaeda operative, let alone an uncooperative one. Resistance wasn’t what turned them to the SERE techniques—top Bush political appointees were readying them for use months in advance of Zubaydah’s capture:

To hear former President Bush tell it, you would think the United States only turned to the techniques in desperation. When Bush announced the existence of the CIA’s interrogation program in September 2006, for example, he argued that suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating with interrogators after his capture on March 28, 2002, forcing the agency to get rough. “We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives,” Bush said. “But he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation,” the president said. “And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures.”

Not to worry, the president explained. “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.”

But that’s not how it happened. Staff reporting to Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., pored over 200,000 pages of documents and interviewed more than 70 people. After months going through the declassification process, their report is a stunningly frank tick-tock of the development of torture policy under the Bush administration. The sequence of events shows the early genesis of torture and also exposes repeated, vivid warnings — falling on deaf ears — that torture is a clumsy, wrongheaded and ineffective way to gather intelligence.